REVIEW: Suuns - Felt

Phillipe Roberts

Drift too far into left-field weirdness and pop becomes the evolutionary frontier. Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Animal Collective, and plenty of others have tumbled deep down the experimental rabbit hole only to produce their (arguably) most cohesive and satisfying efforts. Luckily enough for Montreal’s Suuns, they’ve been around the block before. Felt, their newest creation, isn’t so much a progression into unknown territory as a return to form. Emerging just shy of two years since their last album, the violent electronic odyssey Hold/Still, Suuns puts a lid on the noise and swings the pendulum back towards the soft experimental pop that carried their early efforts. The four-piece embrace the melancholic sentimentality that always seemed to float out of reach and turn in their most direct and instantly affecting record yet.

But make no mistake: Suuns aren’t ready to go quietly. At times, Felt bristles with the same abrasive textures that imparted a gritty surrealism to Hold/Still and passages of Images du Futur. The difference is that these moments are integrated more smoothly into the tracks, appearing as scenes in a larger narrative rather than becoming it. “After the Fall,” a pounding trip-hop sketch, is particularly illustrative of how far they’ve come. Using violin-like scrapes as a pre-chorus, Suuns build up the tension to a terrifying height before vocalist Ben Shemie swoops in to banish it with a sweet melody. And “Moonbeams,” an instrumental that dive-bombs its way in with feedback-choked bluster, clears any sweetness lingering in the air before the final track. Its lo-fi drum sounds blast away at your eardrums in odd-time, swelling and collapsing with violent irregularity.

It’s a testament to the growing symbiosis between the band and producer John Congleton that moments like these feel necessary, a mature expression of will rather than insecure avant-garde provocation. Indeed, Suuns sound more comfortable than ever on this record, and that confidence positively shines on the poppier tracks. “Make It Real” is a full-force, major-key ballad, circling an effervescent keyboard line and swampy drums into arena-sized emotionality, waxing poetic on detachment from “A feeling that you know so well / When you see it in someone else.” Reality comes in waves on “Control,” where samples of a man musing on dreams combine with synth sirens as a rainy backdrop to vocoder-tinged reveries on a life left behind. Suuns can already brood with the best of them, but the vocoder experimentation adds a welcome layer of menace to otherwise warm tracks like “Materials.” At their best, their pop creations sound like a bad acid trip on a sunny day, a nightmare fermenting within a dream.

From the opening moments of “Look No Further”—where detuned 808 bass and sitar-like guitar melt around dusty drums—to the final robotic harmony of “Materials,” Suuns keep a tight orbit around the album's themes (alienation, disconnection, existential dread). Lyrically and instrumentally, every element is deployed in a calculated effort to pull the listener into a sound world that, if not wholly pleasant, is at the very least cohesively unnerving. As Suuns grow brighter, the shadows they cast grow longer.